The Hayseed Scholar Podcast Brent Steele

Professor Sebastian Kaempf of the University of Queensland joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast this week.Seb grew up in Germany, with the fall of the Berlin Wall happening when he was entering his teenage years. While it had a big impact on him, he distinctly remembers his parents’ emotional reactions to that moment. He also was a conscientious objector and thus did not serve in the German military but his service was in some ways even more challenging as he notes here. Seb talks about go...

Professor Lene Hansen of the University of Copenhagen likely needs no introduction to most listeners of this podcast. She has worked within what would be called the Copenhagen school or securitization theory, emphasizing within that school the overlooked lens of gender. Her work on discourse analysis is famous for being a key contribution to the development of especially interpretive methods in the 2000s and 2010s, and her more recent work in visual IR and visual/image analysis. She tal...

Huss Banai of Indiana University is an individual Brent considers himself incredibly fortunate to call a friend. He joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast to tell his amazing story and journey through life and academia. Huss was born in Iran and grew up in Northern Tehran until his family moved to Canada when he was 15. In Iran, Huss and his family experienced the war with Iraq, the fallout from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (his father worked with Afghan refugees during that time), and...

Dr. Erica Simone Almeida Resende of the Brazilian War College joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Erica grew up in Brazil but, as she phrases it, 'in between worlds'. There was her Brazilian home, and there was her German school, which she explains has situated her as a sort of 'bridge' moving between the Global North and Global South. Erica went to law school and worked for a law firm in the 1990s, but changed gears and pursued graduate degrees in Political Science and International Relations...

Professor Jarrod Hayes joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Jarrod was born in Colorado, but moved to Utah at a young age and grew up there for a bit before relocating with his mother to just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. In high school, he found he enjoyed doing research especially with science and technology, and so he went to the University of Colorado to pursue a degree in Astrophysics. But at Colorado he also enjoyed studying International Relations because it seemed to cover the 'big thing...

Dr. Oumar Ba of Cornell University visits the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Ba grew up in Senegal, attending his first school at an early age near the Senegal-Mauritania border. He developed an interest in politics in high school and at his first university (Cheik Anna Diop in Dakar) where he pursued Geography. Oumar moved to the United States in early 2001, taking a Greyhound Bus from New York to Ohio. Following a series of jobs, including one at an auto manufacturing plant, he would return t...